MJS 021 My JS Story Justin Meyers

On this week’s episode of My JS Story, Charles Max Wood interviews Justin MeyersCo­founder and CEO of Bitovi, a Javascript consulting firm focused on simplifying Javascript development through the use and creation of open source tools as well general consulting, training, and web applications. He was on Episode 202 and talked about DoneJS and CanJS. Tune in to hear Justin’s full story!

7th Grade and a TI­82[3:02]
Justin’s discovery of conditional statements and methods on a classic TI­82 was his first taste of programming. With a little guidance, he soon learned to program games on the TI­82 and then later moved onto bigger and better mediums like C and QBasic.

Grunt work is good for you.[4:51]
While studying Computer Science, Justin finds out that professors often have grunt work, and although they may not pay well now, sometimes they can in time lead to loads of experience and maybe even a bigger job. After 4 years of working on websites and writing documentation, he gets his first real job at Accenture.

Open Source and reducing waste. [6:23]
Accenture, while giving him a great chance to make some impressive projects, provoked Justin to see the efficiency in sharing code. Justin and a college friend get together to work on a project to build a platform that…builds. Although their project was unsuccessful, the tools they started to create for the project had plenty of potential.

The Last desperate gasp. AKA shaving his head. [9:40]
Justin talks about the Ajaxian blog and conference. Ten years ago, the Ajaxian blog was one of the best online resources for Javascript news. Justin was running low on funds and struggling and as his “last desperate gasp” he heads to the Ajaxian conference with his head shaved. Leaving only “Javascript MVC” shaped out of his hair. This stunt gets him remembered by many of the important attendees and also scores him his big break with a consulting job with T­-Mobile. Two to Three weeks later, Justin had a stroke. Justin talks about how incredible the timing was.

How Javascript MVC came to be. [13:23]
Justin talks about starting with JSJunction and modeling after it. Their first steps were to add a model layer as well as Event Delegation. Javascript MVC reflects some of Ruby on Rails. Justin worked with Peter Svensson from Dojo, with a methodology that at the time seemed crazy. Justin reminisces when Steve Jobs “Killed” Flash with HTML5 and CSS.

Bitovi begins.[17:24]
Justin talks about how the T­-Mobile job meant that he would need an official business. Originally dubbing it JupiterIT. Justin found that MVC was too encompassing and that programmers enjoyed a sense of creativity. By pulling Javascript MVC’s tools apart and creating single frameworks from the tools, Justin then created tools like CanJS and DoneJS.

Who does the heavy lifting at Bitovi?[20:48]
As the CEO of Bitovi, Justin has less time to program as before. Working with Open Source, development is a mix between contributors and full time employees. The majority being the employees. Justin talks about not having a sales force and focusing on their product to drive sales. Mainly, long term cost of ownership and the ability for the framework to last, working hard to make sure that clients that have committed to Javascript MVC years ago still have a relevant use for the framework.

Exploring HTTP2 and Push.[23:42]
With the emergence of HTTP2 and Push, Justin talks about working on and exploring different ways for streaming/server side rendering. Justin describes one of the experiments with building an empty skeletons, javascript assets, but also pushing instructions on how to mutate the page to the client. Before the javascript payload is fully loaded, the page starts to mutate. Allowing for optimal performance on slower connections, fantastic for mobile. Problems they are looking at for the future include things like different ways that CDNs can work with HTTP2 and Push. Justin has also worked with using Fetch to enable streaming by building tools around that. He suggests that HTTP2 and Push will maybe bring a renaissance in the developer world.

Justin’s side Parsing Project.[28:45]
Additional to his other work, Justin is working on a generic parsing project. Similar to BISON or JISON. Designed for simple parsing at faster speeds. He describes how to compiles to the code that parses your code. Working in runtime.

A way other companies can learn from Bitovi.[29:52]
We don’t know what the future is going to be for code, so packaging the framework into separate repos allows for better scheduling and a better way to manage long term. Updating a segment of a framework can sometimes break another segment if having it all happen together.